Finally, a Movie Worse Than Showgirls

Nymphomaniac, dumb and serious about sex

For nearly two decades, one film, and one film alone, has stood as the shining example of shit movies about sex. That movie is Showgirls, by the Dutch director Paul Verhoeven. The disaster came at the end of a string of unforgettable, brilliant movies by Verhoeven — RoboCop, Total Recall, and Basic Instinct — during which he more or less reinvented the category of high-low entertainment. Verhoeven at least had the guts to show up to receive his Razzie awards for Showgirls. If you're going to make shit, you may as well reap the rewards.

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At the moment, Showgirls is undergoing something of a reevaluation. Already it was one of MGM's top twenty selling videos. Now the critical praise that entirely escaped it on its release is starting to miraculously appear. The Awl this week published an interview with Adam Nayman, the author of It Doesn't Suck, a defense of the movie. His argument is ingenious, even if it rests almost entirely on the brilliance of the rest of Verhoeven's work.

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"You don't like the acting, fine," Nayman told The Awl. "You think the story is bad, fine. But it's like people's brains got sucked out. It is beautifully shot, superbly edited, the camera movements are so well choreographed... but if you start recognizing that, you have to start questioning your assumptions about the stuff on top. What's more likely: That a movie so well made is accidentally atrocious, or is it all in some ways as carefully controlled as the rest of the filmmaking? But people just ignored that possibility altogether."

It's an interesting conundrum. Is it possible for a film to be so self-conscious about its own atrociousness that nobody notices? Can a director intentionally make a "bad" film so well that it just simply becomes a bad film, thereby turning into a triumph? How would we know the difference? If anyone were to attempt such a crazy plan, it has to be said, it would be Verhoeven, a director who rode the line between art and trash so effortlessly. Then again, I rewatched Showgirls after I read Nayman's thoughts, and all I can say is that literally not one minute in the film passes in which something embarrassing, career-destroying, doesn't happen. The only way I could see Showgirls as a good film is if I completely reestablished my criteria of aesthetic values, which may be fun as an intellectual exercise, but isn't a particularly encouraging sign if you're actually looking for a good film to watch tonight.

It may not matter anyway, because in a sense Showgirls is being replaced. A new film has emerged, similarly Eurotrash-y, similarly sexual (and totally unerotic), and similarly terrible. Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac will at least give Showgirls a run for its money in the bad-sex department. One of several famous lines from Showgirls is "I chipped my tooth on a Quaalude." That's the kind of thing the crowds shout out in unison at the ironic midnight viewings. "Would it be all right if I showed the children the whoring bed?" from Nymphomaniac has at least a chance of becoming equally famous. "Am I boring you?" the nymphomaniac asks at one point. "No, I'm just waiting to see how you weave this into your tale," the listener replies. This is the kind of dialogue that gets you kicked out of your night-school screenwriting workshop for not trying hard enough.

Under the guise of its serious purpose, Nymphomaniac is vastly less informed about the nature of sexuality than Showgirls, as impossible as that sounds. Real strippers have, in real life, had sex in swimming pools. At no point, in no world in which ordinary human beings exist, has a group of teenage girls stared at a wall chanting, "Mea vulva, mea maxima vulva." Not even in Denmark, where von Trier was born. The sexual fantasies, as fantasies, are a combination of utterly tame (having sex in a train, big deal) and self-importantly transgressive. Both Showgirls and Nymphomaniac are adolescent — they take sex much more seriously than it should be taken while treating it as a stupid game. They act as if they know everything about sex while revealing that they are totally innocent of its deeper crises and revelations. The difference is that Showgirls at least has the frame of a joke. Nymphomaniac truly thinks it knows what it's talking about, which is so much more pathetic.

Which explains why Nymphomaniac is a worse film than Showgirls, and thus deserves to replace it. Showgirls is only stupid by its own superficial lights. Nymphomaniac is stupid all the way down. Showgirls had to wait nearly two decades to find a defender. Will Nymphomaniac find voices raised to support it twenty years from now? Not the faintest chance. It's too bad.